What Evil Lies At The End Of Holly Bush Lane?

My car has a satellite navigation computer which has helped me out on numerous occasions given my relatively limited knowledge of the local geography of southern England, having only lived here for a couple of years.

However, it's not 100% perfect. There are a couple of glitches as far as its understanding the entire length of the M1 motorway is concerned and it repeatedly instructs me to exit at the wrong junction every time I traverse north on the M1 from London, heading home.

Having said that I have learned to trust it more often than not, even when it appears to be sending me in the wrong direction or when my instinctive sense of direction would lead me another way. Most of the time 'Betty', as I like to call her, gets it right and she has saved me enormous amounts of time finding places I'd never find in a month of Sundays. But the other day she abused my trust and left me confused and more than a little spooked.

En route to a certain destination I found myself being guided by Betty down an increasingly odd sequence of twists and turns that contradicted my own sense of where we should have been heading. But as I said above, I've learned to trust her and I know to let her just lead the way and so that is what I did. Shortly afterwards we turned off the main road and entered Holly Bush Lane which was a single track road which and the further along it I travelled, the more off-road the conditions became. All signs of civilisation slowly drew back into the distance and a well weathered and beaten up old caravan appeared to my right and whilst it was in poor condition, it looked as if it was habitable; moreover its door lay ominously open, I thought.

I began to question the sense in continuing down what was an increasingly strange route but, trusting Betty, I decided to continue onwards. Such were the road conditions beneath me, I was barely able to move along more quickly than 5mph, weaving left and right, up and down through what seemed like a million pot-holes in the now dusty and increasingly more broken up track below.

Betty barked at me, "Straight On!" as her screen read "3/4 Mile" to the next turning instruction which very, very slowly then became "1/2 Mile" as we crept further and further down Holly Bush Lane.

All that stretched out in front of me was the same featureless dusty track with not a soul in sight and I noticed it was couched in ever-thickening bushes and trees that seemed to creep closer and closer to the centre of the track ahead of me. It was not a welcoming sight.

As the gravel crackled under my tyres as we drove towards the end of the lane I thought about what horrors would I find waiting for me at the end of Holly Bush Lane.

Images flashed across my mind of a lost community of savages, reminiscent of Mad Max's Thunderdome but populated instead by missing business executives who had also been tricked by their evil SatNav systems long before me, only to find themselves trapped forever in a SatNav black hole and forced to live off the land, sitting around from dusk to dawn in their Recaro bucket seats, hunched around a camp-fire for warmth, ravenous and waiting for the next hapless victim to arrive with the fresh promise of some half eaten sandwich crusts or perhaps a luxurious tin of boiled sweets in the glove compartment.

Or would I find hell on earth filled with burned out BMW's, Merc's and other tricked out executive cars, with their owners long since extracted and consumed by some evil force that lived off the fattened torsos of capitalist pigs and 800lb board-room gorillas.

Suddenly the trance that had consumed me lifted and in a flash I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded sharply to a halt, crunching the gravel beneath. "Straight On!" ordered Betty, in a tone that sounded more fraught than usual. There was only a 1/4 mile to go before the end of Holly Bush Lane. We sat motionless for a few moments before I slowly found the sense to reach out towards the SatNav Off button and push it in. My hands still shaking, I then fumbled for the gear stick, hurriedly selected reverse then headed back down the lane in the direction from which I had come.

But to this day I feel a calling, something is drawing me back to Holly Bush Lane and I'm curious to know what's down there, and maybe one day I'll find out or, if not me, then maybe whoever takes ownership of Betty after me. I should warn them about Holly Bush Lane.

Post Equinoctial Retro-Consumptive Behavioural Disorder

I've recently come to realise that the only reason I buy stuff is for me to be able to tell how long it has been since I last wore the jacket I was wearing when I bought said stuff. This phenomenon is brought to us by virtue of dated till receipts that hibernate all summer in the pockets of my winter jackets and which I always seem to find whenever I adorn warmer winter clothing around this time of year. I should say that this isn't exclusively reserved to winter wear, as by habit I don't usually wear jackets anyway - I'm Scottish and of a blueish-white skinned, cold and wet weather resistant persuasion.

Wait a minute!! now that I think of it, perhaps there's a link between me not wearing jackets very often and the rush of adrenalin I get whenever I discover and old till receipt in a jacket pocket. Perhaps I crave that 'what did we have for dinner the last time I wore this baby?' rush so badly that I am subconciously directed to not to wear jackets very often, thus maximising the thrill upon wearing one after a while.

Shit. I'd never thought of it like that.

How fragile we are.

Live Fast, Die Young

Or, How Jakob Neilsen Killed Concorde.

If there's one good thing to come out of the the last flight of Concorde on Friday, it's that at least France got three hours further away from the USA, something I know will warm the hearts of many fellow citizens. Being British, nae Scottish in fact, I have to say that the French have always been held in a certain high regard by Scots under the terms of the "Auld Alliance". In simplistic parlance, both the Scots and the French used to like to gang up on the English and slap them about a bit, until the Act of Union took all the fun out of it. But I'm not supposed talking about the French, I'm supposed to be talking about Concorde which, I suppose, is a French word and was a French concept to start with, so cut me some slack.

Concorde (the supersonic passenger jet) was designed to make the world a smaller place and therefore with it's passing, the world must have just gotten a little bigger. That is, of course, unless you happen to be the crew of a Blackbird SR-51 spyplane. We know that the Web too, was supposed to make the world a smaller place - a "global village" to use the vernacular of the times.

Could it be that poor old Concorde could just no longer keep up with the new planetary dietician on the block - the Web? Or, more likely, have we just gotten too good at saving time in almost everything that we do, so efficient and fast as a species by virtue of great design and usability (see Mr Nielsen) ; in our cars, mobile phones, with our traffic reports, our washing machines, video recorders, text messages, emails, web sites, 24 hour news channels, fast food, RSS news aggregators, quickie divorces, drive-thru chapels of love in Vegas and so the list would go on - if I had the time - that we just can't save any more time? So much so, in fact, that a three hour transatlanic time saving just doesn't cut it these days.

Thirty years ago Concorde was about the biggest time saving device on the planet. Today it isn't, quite literally since you can't fly on it now - but you get the picture.

In other words, Concorde had gotten too slow for us, it never kept up with the times, actually the more I think about it, the more I see an equation emerging; a slower and bigger capacity 747 Jumbo with 400 passengers each carrying a mobile phone or a PDA, probably saves at least twice as much time as 100 passengers on a single Concorde flight over the same distance.

Whomever they choose to design the next generation passenger jet - Jakob Nielsen would be a good place to start - they should ensure that the time saving characteristics of the plane should not simply be confined to it's stupendously ridiculous airspeed.